The art of literary translation is receiving increasing support, as though awards and prizes might encourage more writers, old and young, to poke their heads above the monoglot parapet. The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, now in its ninth year, is awarded annually at St Anne's College to the translator(s) into English of a work of fiction, poetry or drama written in any living European language by any author living or dead. The translation may be the work of up to three translators and must have been published for the first time in the preceding year. The prize is unique and enjoys a growing reputation. The Chairman of the jury, Dr Patrick McGuinness, is based at St Anne's. The jury considers the quality of the translation and also the quality and importance of the original work, and the value of its circulation in English.

This year's winner was announced by Lord Weidenfeld at a reception at St Anne's College on Wednesday 9 June, at which the acclaimed author, Mario Vargas Llosa, Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University, was also present. The shortlist comprised: Julio Llamazares The Yellow Rain (Margaret Jull Costa, Harvill Press), Manuel Rivas In the Wilderness (Jonathan Dunne, Harvill Press), Andrei Platonov Soul (Robert & Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson, Harvill Press), Ernst Jünger Storm of Steel (Michael Hofmann, Penguin Books), Henri Barbusse Under Fire (Robin Buss, Penguin Books), Istvan Baka Selected Poems (Peter Zollman, with contributions from Michael Longley, George Szirtes, Bill Tinley and John W. Wilkinson, Abbey Press). Michael Hofmann's Jünger won.


Robina Pelham Burn, Director of the Stephen Spender Memorial Trust (20 Kimbolton Road, Bedford MK40 2NR) has written to tell us of the new Stephen Spender Prize, just launched by The Times and the Trust. This poetry translation prize exists to encourage young people (30 or under on 31 December, resident in Britain), to translate a poem from any language, classical or modern, into English. They have to submit the original and their translation together with a comment of up to 300 words by16 July. There will be cash prizes in two categories: Under-18 and Open. The Times will publish the best entries in each category. The winners will be announced at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in early November.

The prize draws attention to the art of literary translation, at a time when fewer and fewer schoolchildren and undergraduates encounter foreign literature. The Times will promote the prize for three years. Details and entry forms are available from www.stephen-spender.org or by post from the address above.


The Poetry Book Society has announced its Next Generation Poets promotion. The twenty poets (or rather, books of poems), successors to the controversial `New Generation' promotion of 1994, were chosen by a deliberately unspecialised panel of judges, with Andrew Motion in the chair: Simon Armitage, Bernadine Evaristo, Colin Greenwood (bass player in Radiohead), A.L. Kennedy, James Naughtie and Marie Robertson (PBS Member) read all the submitted work by poets who had emerged in the last decade. The aim was, in part at least, to develop a new readership for poetry. There will be numerous events around the promotion. The collections chosen are: Patience Agbabi, Transformatrix (Canongate); Amanda Dalton, How to Disappear (Bloodaxe); Nick Drake, The Man in the White Suit (Bloodaxe); Jane Draycott, Prince Rupert's Drop (Carcanet/ Oxford Poets); Paul Farley, The Ice Age (Picador); Leontia Flynn, Matthew Francis, Dragons (Faber); Sophie Hannah, First of the Last Chances (Carcanet); Tobias Hill, Midnight in the City of Clocks (Carcanet/Oxford Poets); Gwyneth Lewis, Keeping Mum (Bloodaxe); Alice Oswald, Dart (Faber); Pascale Petit, The Zoo Father (Seren); Jacob Polley, The Brink (Picador); Deryn Rees Jones, The Memory Tray (Seren); Maurice Riordan, Floods (Faber); Robin Robertston, A Painted Field (Picador); Owen Sheers, The Blue Book (Seren); Henry Shukman, In Dr No's Garden (Cape); Catherine Smith, The Butcher's Hands (Smith Doorstop); Jean Sprackland, Hard Water (Cape).


In April it was announced that FRANZ WRIGHT had won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Walking to Martha's Vineyard (Knopf), a collection, the publisher tells us, `in which the poet shares his belief in the promise of life's blessing and renewal'. The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced the names of poets who receive its 2004 awards in literature. The committee of selectors includes Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, Romulus Linney, Reynolds Price, Jane Smiley and Edmund White. Academy Awards in Literature have been made to, among others, Henri Cole and Marilyn Hacker. The E.M. Forster Award to a young writer from England, Ireland, Scotland, or Wales for a stay in the United States (jury: Robert Creeley, Donald Hall, Alison Lurie) has gone to Robin Robertson. The Award of Merit for Poetry given once every six years to an outstanding poet has gone to Rosanna Warren.


James Sutherland Smith writes: `My friend, IVAN LAUCIK, perhaps Slovakia's best poet of the last fifty years, died yesterday [12 May 2004]. He was one of the three "Osameli beczi" (Solitary Runners), the others being the poets Ivan Strpka and Peter Repka, who were influenced by the freedom brought to language and subject by the Beat poets, notably Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, whom they met in the 1960s. In the 1960s the Solitary Runners called for a Slovak poetry free from obligatory gestures towards Socialism, a poetry which could simply be itself. For their pains all three were unable to publish from 1970 until the late 1980s. Laucik spent his time of silence working as a schoolmaster in his home town of Liptovsky Mikulas in the Tatra mountains. He was less prolific than either Strpka or Repka but his three collections and Collected Poems (published last year) were enormously influential on the younger generation of Slovak poets.' The poem `March Invocation' is translated by Viera and James Sutherland-Smith.

Let the snow declare
in the pine needles
what again is an embrace ...
Let there also be included news from sunlit nights!
Let the silence not forget us
as we do not forget a little flame
left in a cave!

I write to you from a future void
wedged already into this moment and from an uncertain
place on the maps:
Here I invoke a windy night
so as not to extinguish our candles
when the stars of March must fizz out.

NIKOS STANGOS, who as an editor at Penguin Books did so much for poetry in the 1960s, and who was himself a poet and translator, died of cancer in April, aged sixty-seven. He was the first editor to bring Ashbery, Bukowski, Pessoa, Tsvetaeva and Ritsos, among many others, to a British readership. With Stephen Spender he translated Cavafy and provided the occasion for Hockney's famous illustrations. This project brought together many of his motivating interests in terms of poetry, theme and art. Allen Lane chose him for the Penguin job and his abiding impact on English poetry is a matter of record. He published Alvarez's The New Poetry and the Penguin Trilogies and European Poets. He made discoveries and helped to redraw the map for his and subsequent decades. He was always available to other writers and publishers, generous with his counsel and with his time. His vocations were art and literature and he pursued them with kindness and zeal: `a great enabler', as one obituarist put it. He and his life-long partner the novelist David Plante were cordial and lively hosts.


KU SANG, the Korean poet and essayist, died in Seoul in May. He was eighty-four years old. He was raised a Roman Catholic, and his elder brother, a priest, was murdered by the Communists at the outbreak of the Korean War. He was educated in Japan and remained in troubled communion, having learned many lessons from Buddhism. There is considerable variety in his poetry, from social witness to the hardships the war occasioned, to poems of a spiritual and ecological bent. There is a profound optimism about his work, a sense of a pervading, benign divine presence.


FARIS GLUBB, the poet, journalist and devoted Muslim, son of Glubb Pasha, has died as the result of a car accident in Kuwait at the age of 64. He was born in Jerusalem. His parents, evangelical Christians, christened him Godfrey. But he rebelled against their faith and much of their culture. He chose to live in Tunisia and then in Jordan, working there with the Palestinian refugees and in broadcasting. He covered the Lebanese civil war from Beirut, and then from Cyprus the larger situation in the Middle East.


One of India's leading poets and writers DOM (Dominic Francis) MORAES died in Mumbai in June. He was sixty-five years old. His first book, Beginnings, published when he was nineteen, won the Hawthornden Prize. He was soon a Poetry Book Society Choice and appeared in many anthologies. Then in 1965 he fell poetically silent. It is appropriate that, on learning of his death, the new Sikh Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh, should have celebrated the man and his legacy. India has lost a writer of abiding importance, and an enigmatic literary phenomenon. Moraes was a child prodigy who went his own way. As poet and memoirist he rejected the categories which have propelled others into prominence abroad in academias hungry for post-Colonial specimens. Dom evaded the domestic pressures of a narrowed nationalism and the temptations of fashionable ideological role-play. In the end he and his work answer to no one but himself. To some readers this seems an admirable achievement, against the cultural odds. He is not limited in subject-matter or theme to India or to the nowadays compulsory-seeming issues of `cultural identity'. The facts of his nationality and ethnicity did not delimit or circumscribe his poetic world, and he never had the effrontery to `speak for' a constituency or to pretend to be an everyman. He was cured - by travel, by reading, and by some of the cruelties of his childhood experience - from the sentimentality of an easy, constrictive `belonging'. His example itself has proven emancipating to a new generation of Indian writers.

On the three occasions I met Dom Moraes he was accompanied by the architect and writer Sarayu Srivatsa, his companion and collaborator, a woman of great intelligence, traditional Indian beauty, wit and wry forbearance. They were a team, full of diverse plans and book projects. A few weeks ago I received from him a new suite of poems for PN Review. He was still at work, and how well he was writing. He had had cancer for three years. When he came to the Literatures of the Commonwealth Festival in Manchester in 2003 he told me it would be his last visit. He travelled with Sarayu and his tumour, nicknamed Gorgi. He read with the quiet intensity he was famed for, and it was a privilege and joy to watch and almost to hear him.

Sarayu reports that he died in Mumbai of a heart attack, during his siesta. The day before, he went out shopping for a fish tank, some Japanese fighting fish and terrapins. He loved to watch: this is an aspect of his poems and of their prosody, a close attention, a gaze into human and inhuman occasions. His poems convey at once a passion and a patience. Those critics who believe he is in some way `untrue' to his informing culture need to re-read him. He worked himself free of an aesthetic of effect towards something more exploratory and wholly his own, a language to deal with an awareness of cultural and psychological isolation, with libidinal and spiritual passions, and with landscapes in which synaesthesia is built in to the very words for colour, taste and scent.

Here is part of his third sonnet from his final sonnet sequence which will appear in PNR 159. The figure evoked is a last, intense belovèd.

Death will be an interruption of my days, of
all matters pertinent to me, and the private
intimacies I have that cannot be taken away.
It will interrupt my talks with my dead father,
moribund friends, and bent, witchlike trees;
and most of all interrupt what I have with her
who lives and saves me from my lost countries.